The Problem with Black People

Let me tell you a tale, one of a younger The Edward, an The Edward back in college. Back then, I was a different person to be sure, but the one way in which I was very different I will describe to you now: I hated black people. Stupid people, not in touch with their surroundings, very rude, etc, basically one step above chimps. But, that wasn't the problem. The problem is that I didn't like Hispanic people either. Stupid people, not in touch with their surroundings, very rude, etc, basically one step above chimps. And not only that, I hated gay people. Stupid people, not in touch with their surroundings, very rude, etc, basically one step above chimps. Do you see a pattern here? A better summary that one could draw based on my statements: I hated every Human equally. That wasn't the problem either. What is the point/problem with this younger The Edward and his world? The problem with Black People or Any People that classify themselves, is that they classified themselves - and I didn't, they were all just Human to me. Equally Human.

So, I would walk around hating people back then. I lived in an area of a City where it was predominately black people. The problem I had was that groups of people who think of themselves as different for some reason, would think I hated them for the color of their skin, sexual orientation, religion, etc, rather than their Human-ness. If I refused to talk to someone who considered themselves to be black, they would shout racist things at me, believing that I was a racist so therefore it was okay to let out their true racist nature upon me. This tended to cause me a lot of problems back then.

I realized that my internal dislike for people was not only justified, but appeared to have been shared by everyone around me. Sure, these other people weren't original thinkers, they were taking my general hatred and internalizing based on their own preconceived notions. It was kind of annoying for me, because they took my general feelings and trying to make it that I hated them specifically and went out of my way to think about them, rather than that I was just trying to avoid all possible contact with any of them. They took my feelings and twisted them to their own means, and I of course hated them for that as well.

"You and your people..." is a phrase that can get someone in trouble if one is not aware of which group a listening Human considers himself to be a part of. I think it to be pretty obvious, "you" being Human "and your people" being the rest of the Human race. Or "Your kind is always slow in thinking." "You people need to stop being such idiots." "On the planet I hail from, things are done better." See, obvious what I am talking about!

The Edward

PS There was a funny scene on "3rd Rock from the Sun" (which was about aliens living among us) where he kept forgetting that one of his coworkers considered herself to be black and therefore would misconstrue his feelings about humans as feelings about blacks, since that was the World in Which She Lived. So, took a sticky note, wrote Black on it, and put it on her forehead so that he would remember to treat her as a black person rather than as a human. This of course caused problems because of her perspective on what had happened. Some old story, it really is all a matter of perspective...